Individuals are motivated to increase their social status. To succeed in this pursuit, people must track information about others in their social sphere, monitor group norms, and adjust their behavior strategically. This study employed functional MRI and ecological momentary assessment methods in a sample of 92 college students belonging to 9 social groups to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying these processes and their relationship to conformity in the context of alcohol use. When young adults passively looked at faces of their real-life social group peers, brain systems implicated in valuation and social cognition spontaneously tracked information about the popularity and leadership status of the social targets in an interdependent manner. Individual differences in these neural valuations were systematically associated with varying levels of conformity. Students who had stronger responses to faces of peers with relatively higher popularity and leadership status than themselves in one key valuation brain region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), were more likely to align their drinking behavior with their groups' norms in everyday life. These results provide evidence for how brain systems involved in valuation and social cognition flexibly track information about peers' popularity and leadership status in real-life social groups and contribute to a growing literature on the neural mechanisms through which social comparison processes shape conformity. Our study highlights the vmPFC as a central hub that spontaneously tracks status differences between the self and peers and uses this information to guide behavior to match group norms.

Developing interventions to change health behaviors—especially those targeting cross-cutting health risk factors like alcohol use—is a public health priority. In this study, we used a translational neuroscience approach to evaluate the underlying mechanisms and individual differences in a mindful distancing intervention designed to reduce alcohol consumption among college students. We combined functional neuroimaging and machine learning to develop a brain-based predictive model (a “neural signature”) of mindful distancing. This model allowed us to track moment-to-moment variation in how participants implemented the strategy, as well as differences between individuals. Students completed a mindful distancing task involving alcohol cues during fMRI scanning. They then completed a 28-day, smartphone-based, experience sampling intervention. In the laboratory, mindfully attending to alcohol decreased craving, particularly among people who more strongly expressed the mindful distancing signature. In daily life, the mindful distancing intervention increased mindful responses to alcohol and decreased subsequent alcohol consumption through two distinct pathways: mindful responses directly influenced alcohol consumption and indirectly influenced it by reducing cravings for alcohol. Individuals with stronger expression of the neural signature experienced the greatest benefits from the intervention. These findings extend theoretical models of how mindfulness-based emotion regulation strategies impact alcohol use in emerging adults without alcohol use disorders. They also demonstrate the potential of using neural signatures to evaluate health behavior change interventions within a translational neuroscience framework.

Close social relationships are critical for emotional well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted in-person contact with friends, particularly among young adults, for whom friendships support key developmental goals. In a longitudinal study of U.S. college students (N = 205; 10,088 observations), we examined how close friendship networks related to emotional well-being during the early months of the pandemic (May-October 2020). Leveraging prepandemic social network data and 28 days of ecological momentary assessments of affect and social interactions, we found that students with more close college friends reported higher positive affect and lower negative affect in daily life, even while physically separated from those friends. These individuals were buffered from the emotional toll of pandemic-related stressors, a pattern not explained by personality, interaction frequency, or living conditions. Rather, participants with more close friends experienced higher quality online interactions. Additionally, personal disclosures, whether in-person or online, were consistently associated with greater feelings of closeness. Notably, individuals with fewer close friends showed the largest boost in closeness following partner disclosures, suggesting that emotional sharing may play a compensatory role for those with limited social ties. These findings illustrate how friendships can continue to shape affective experiences from afar and highlight disclosure as a key mechanism through which closeness and its emotional benefits can be cultivated. Integrating social network structure, daily affect, and interaction-level processes, this work advances affective science by providing evidence of how the social regulation of emotion extends beyond physical proximity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Studies on college drinking-a behavior associated with health risks and reduced productivity-often rely on broadly defined peer or friendship networks. Yet, friendship networks can be further divided into more specific relational types, and the associations between such diverse social ties and drinking ties remain poorly understood. This study adopts a multilayer network framework to conduct a fine-grained examination of ten distinct types of social networks (i.e., layers)-including friendship, leadership, emotional support, and perceived drinking-by analyzing their structural similarity across three levels (node, link, and triad) and along a relationship-axis spectrum. We cluster networks based on these multi-level similarities, identifying three primary clusters (Affiliation, Leadership, and Drinking) and assess whether these structurally coherent clusters contribute to improved link prediction performance in perceived drinking networks. Both k-means clustering based on multi-level structural similarity and projection-based analysis along the hierarchical-horizontal spectrum revealed that perceived drinking nominations are structurally closest to leadership layers, followed by emotional support layers within the Affiliation cluster. Assessing whether these functional clusters can improve link prediction in perceived drinking networks, we find that layers within the same cluster yield predictive performance close to that of models using all layers. Notably, emotional support layers, which may reflect their structural proximity and distributed connectivity, offer the highest link prediction accuracy for drinking ties. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that coherent clusters of fine-grained, functionally and structurally aligned social layers facilitate more efficient inference in sparse or partially observed drinking-related networks. This, in turn, highlights their potential utility in predicting and preventing health-risk behaviors-such as alcohol use-that are typically difficult to observe or measure directly, and clarifies the types of relationships most strongly associated with such behaviors.

Purpose The purpose of the present investigation was to determine the extent to which individuals at the extremes of the aerobic fitness continuum differed in their utilization of arithmetic strategies. Method Using a cross-sectional design, 37 higher aerobically fit and 37 lower aerobically fit participants completed a complex arithmetic task while neuroelectric measures were concurrently recorded. The arithmetic task had participants view a pair of sequentially presented two-digit operands and determine if the sum was greater than or <100 which manipulated the utilization of exact and approximate arithmetic strategies. Results Individuals with higher aerobic fitness demonstrated a greater tendency to utilize more efficient approximate arithmetic strategies as the sums grew more distant from 100 in contrast to their lower aerobic fitness counterparts, indexed using a composite measure of behavioral and neuroelectric data. Conclusion Superior aerobic fitness relates to a greater ability to shift between procedural strategies for arithmetic problems.

In 203 (mean age = 38.04 years, SD = 12.05) participants, we tested the association between valenced news and affect using a 14-day, smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment protocol consisting of two components: 1) a once-per-day experimental protocol in which participants were exposed to good news and bad news stories and 2) a four-times-per-day protocol capturing ecological fluctuations in news consumption. Across both protocols, we replicate findings that consumption of positively valenced news is associated with increased positive affect and decreased negative affect while consumption of negatively valenced news is associated with increased negative affect and decreased positive affect. By integrating the ecological momentary assessment data with network science methodologies, news selection and news effects were modeled simultaneously, uncovering selection processes whereby current positive affect, but not negative affect, predicted future valenced news consumption. Altogether, findings indicate that everyday news consumption influences positive and negative affect and may serve mood management functions for positive but not negative affect.

Acute aerobic exercise has a facilitative effect on task components with varied inhibitory control demands. However, the effects on specific neural processes evoked by an inhibitory control task remain underexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of acute aerobic exercise on midfrontal theta event-related synchronisation and frontal alpha event-related desynchronisation, two EEG frequency markers that index distinct neural process during inhibitory control. Fifty-eight college-age students (mean age = 19.2 +/- 1.0 years old) participated in this within-subjects, crossover, pretest-posttest design study. Participants engaged in a 20-minute bout of aerobic exercise condition and an active control condition on separate days in a counterbalanced order. The aerobic exercise condition consisted of walking/jogging on a treadmill at moderate intensity (approximately 70% of age-predicted maximum heart rate). The active control condition consisted of walking on the treadmill at 0.5 mph and 0% grade. Before and after both conditions, participants completed a flanker task, with concurrent EEG data collection. Despite shorter reaction times following aerobic exercise relative to following active control condition, neither aerobic exercise nor active control condition modulated midfrontal theta event-related synchronisation (which indexes control and behavioural monitoring process) or frontal alpha event-related desynchronisation (which reflects cognitive integration mechanism). Collectively, while acute aerobic exercise enhances inhibitory control performance at a behavioural level, these effects do not extend to the modulation of neural processes underlying behaviour adaptation and cognitive integration mechanisms.

Family conflict is a well-established predictor of well-being in youth. Traditional approaches focus on between-family differences in conflict. Daily fluctuations in conflict within families might also impact wellbeing, but more research is needed to understand how and why. Using 21 days of daily diary data and 6-times a day experience-sampling data (n=77 participants; mean age=21.18, SD=1.75; 63 women, 14 men), we captured day-to-day and within-day fluctuations in family conflict, anger, anxiety, and sadness. Using multilevel models, we find that days of higher than usual anger are also days of higher than usual family conflict. Examining associations between family conflict and emotions within days, we find that moments of higher than usual anger predict higher than usual family conflict later in the day. We observe substantial between-family heterogeneity in these patterns with implications for well-being; youth showing substantial interplay between family conflict and emotions across time had more perseverative family conflict and greater trait anxiety. Overall, findings indicate the importance of increases in youth anger for experiences of family conflict during young adulthood and demonstrate how intensive repeated measures coupled with network analytic approaches can capture long-theorized notions of circularly causal processes in daily family life.

It is critical to support healthy development of alcohol-related habits, particularly in contexts with heightened risk such as college campuses. Mindfulness-based strategies are frequently used in interventions to reduce substance use in clinical populations, but their utility as a preventative strategy among emerging adults is less clear. Combining multivariate neuroimaging, intervention, and experience sampling methodologies, we tested the degree to which mindful attention reduces alcohol cravings in the laboratory and consumption in daily life in a sample of college students. Students completed a mindful attention task towards alcohol in an fMRI scanner followed by a 28-day, smartphone-based, experience sampling intervention. We leveraged functional neuroimaging and machine learning to develop a neural measure (signature) of mindful attention that enabled us to examine moment-to-moment fluctuations and individual differences in effective implementation of mindful attention. In the laboratory, mindfully attending to alcohol decreased craving, particularly among people who more strongly expressed the mindful attention signature. In daily life, the mindful attention intervention increased mindful responses to alcohol and decreased lagged alcohol consumption through two distinct pathways: mindful responses directly influenced alcohol consumption and indirectly influenced it by reducing cravings for alcohol. Moreover, individuals who more strongly expressed the mindful attention signature benefitted the most from the intervention. Broadly, our study highlights how mindful attention can reduce alcohol consumption among emerging adults in college via a scalable smartphone-based intervention.

Research findings: The present study examined the associations among meeting 24-hour movement behavior recommendations set by the World Health Organization (2019) and young children’s self-regulation and quantity estimation skills in a sample of 123 children (n = 65 female; 4.9 ± 0.7 years) in mid-Michigan. Meeting screen time recommendations alone, meeting physical activity recommendations in combination with either sleep or screen time recommendations, meeting more recommendations overall, and being active more days weekly were associated with superior quantity estimation. Meeting more guidelines and accruing more moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily related to better self-regulation. Improvements in self-regulation partially mediated the relation between physical activity and quantity estimation. Practice or policy: Our findings identify benefits for adopting specific physical activity guidelines for children (e.g., physical activity, screen time, and sleep duration) and integrating these into early learning standards so both families and schools can support children’s capacity to meet 24-hr movement guidelines and thus support cognitive health. An active lifestyle in early childhood may support young children’s self-regulation and early educational outcomes, with physical activity promotion efforts during early childhood serving as a viable means to address growing expulsion rates in preschool-aged children.

The World Health Organization (WHO) guideline on screen time during early childhood is no more than 1 hour of high-quality programming daily, yet the evidence if meeting screen time recommendations influences children’s self-regulation is unclear. PURPOSE: To examine associations among meeting screen time guidelines, socioeconomic status, and self-regulation. METHODS: Caregivers reported on children’s (n = 72 children; 35 girls, 5.4 ± 1.8 years) screen time and self-regulation 10 times per day across 14 days using smartphones. Self-regulation was measured using the Daily Self-Regulation survey from Ludwig et al. (2018), which has attentional, emotional, and behavioral subscales. Screen time was measured adapting NHANES questions for daily use. Socioeconomic status was measured using the community ladder of the McArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. Daily screen time and self-regulation were calculated as the intraindividual mean across 140 reports. Screen time was coded for meeting the WHO guideline (0 = did not meet; 1 = meet) if the intraindividual mean screen was ≥1 hour. The best-fitting stepwise regression model was selected based on AIC, Variance Inflation Factor, and R2. RESULTS: Children spent 77.4 ± 58.4 mins on screen-based activities daily and 50% of children met screen time guidelines. SES, meeting screen time guidelines, and the interaction between SES and meeting screen time guidelines significantly predicted children’s self-regulation, F’s(3,67) ≥ 5.9, p’s ≤ 0.001, R’s2 ≥ 0.21. Simple slopes analyses revealed that meeting the screen time guideline was associated with higher emotional (b’s ≥ 7.58), attentional (b’s ≥ 10.18), and behavioral (b’s ≥ 9.31) self-regulation for children with lower and average SES, p’s ≤ 0.05. Meeting screen time and self-regulation was unrelated for children with higher SES, p’s ≥ 0.50. CONCLUSION: While these findings preclude causal inference, our results suggest a potential role for policies and programs that help children meet screen time guidelines, which seems particularly protective for children living in households with low-SES.

Self-regulation is a critical emergent developmental competency that lays the foundation for children’s later psychosocial health and academic achievement. Recent work indicates that physical activity and energetic play opportunities support children’s self-regulation in the early childhood classroom. Many early childhood programs offer opportunities for children to engage in play, but teachers are rarely seen modeling physically active behaviors and face barriers to integrating opportunities for energetic play with early academic skills. Early childhood educational settings hoping to support children’s self-regulation development can provide multiple opportunities for children to observe teachers modeling physical activity, provide teacher support and scaffolding for physically active learning centers, and engage children in meaningful energetic play while promoting a range of academic skills. This article provides 10 research-based guidelines for supporting children’s self-regulation development through physical activity in early childhood classrooms.

Evidence on the harms and benefits of social media use is mixed, in part because the effects of social media on well-being depend on a variety of individual difference moderators. Here, we explored potential neural moderators of the link between time spent on social media and subsequent negative affect. We specifically focused on the strength of correlation among brain regions within the frontoparietal system, previously associated with the top-down cognitive control of attention and emotion. Participants (N = 54) underwent a resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Participants then completed 28 days of ecological momentary assessment and answered questions about social media use and negative affect, twice a day. Participants who spent more than their typical amount of time on social media since the previous time point reported feeling more negative at the present moment. This within-person temporal association between social media use and negative affect was mainly driven by individuals with lower resting state functional connectivity within the frontoparietal system. By contrast, time spent on social media did not predict subsequent affect for individuals with higher frontoparietal functional connectivity. Our results highlight the moderating role of individual functional neural connectivity in the relationship between social media and affect.

Modifying behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, is difficult. Creating psychological distance between unhealthy triggers and one's present experience can encourage change. Using two multisite, randomized experiments, we examine whether theory-driven strategies to create psychological distance-mindfulness and perspective-taking-can change drinking behaviors among young adults without alcohol dependence via a 28-day smartphone intervention (Study 1, N = 108 participants, 5492 observations; Study 2, N = 218 participants, 9994 observations). Study 2 presents a close replication with a fully remote delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. During weeks when they received twice-a-day intervention reminders, individuals in the distancing interventions reported drinking less frequently than on control weeks-directionally in Study 1, and significantly in Study 2. Intervention reminders reduced drinking frequency but did not impact amount. We find that smartphone-based mindfulness and perspective-taking interventions, aimed to create psychological distance, can change behavior. This approach requires repeated reminders, which can be delivered via smartphones.

Together, data from brain scanners and smartphones have sufficient coverage of biology, psychology, and environment to articulate between-person differences in the interplay within and across biological, psychological, and environmental systems thought to underlie psychopathology. An important next step is to develop frameworks that combine these two modalities in ways that leverage their coverage across layers of human experience to have maximum impact on our understanding and treatment of psychopathology. We review literature published in the last 3 years highlighting how scanners and smartphones have been combined to date, outline and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches, and sketch a network science framework heretofore underrepresented in work combining scanners and smartphones that can push forward our understanding of health and disease.

Shifts in the production, dissemination, and consumption of valenced news stories in recent years raise new questions concerning the effects of everyday news consumption on our affective experiences. In a sample of 203 (125 women, 77 men, 1 agender person; mean age = 38.04 years, SD=12.05) participants, we tested the effects of valenced news consumption on affective states as participants went about their daily lives using a 14-day, smartphone-based intensive repeated measures protocol consisting of two components: 1) a once-per-day experimental protocol in which participants were exposed to good news and bad news stories that were consistent across all participants and 2) a four-times-per-day naturalistic protocol designed to capture naturalistic fluctuations in valenced news consumption. Results show that across both experimental and naturalistic protocols, consumption of positively valenced news is associated with increased positive affect and decreased negative affect while consumption of negatively valenced news is associated with increased negative affect and decreased positive affect. These news consumption-affect associations are heightened when the news is deemed to be personally relevant to the target. By integrating intensive repeated measures and network science methodologies, news selection and news effects were simultaneously modeled and suggest that, in addition to media effects, selection processes whereby current affect predicts future news consumption also occur in daily life. Specifically, when positive affect is higher than usual, news consumed later in the day is more positively valenced than usual. Altogether, findings indicate that everyday news consumption has substantial effects on immediate positive and negative affect and may also serve mood management functions.

OBJECTIVE:A holistic understanding of the naturalistic dynamics among physical activity, sleep, emotions, and purpose in life as part of a system reflecting wellness is key to promoting well-being. The main aim of this study was to examine the day-to-day dynamics within this wellness system. METHODS:Using self-reported emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, anxiousness) and physical activity periods collected twice per day, and daily reports of sleep and purpose in life via smartphone experience sampling, more than 28 days as college students ( n = 226 young adults; mean [standard deviation] = 20.2 [1.7] years) went about their daily lives, we examined day-to-day temporal and contemporaneous dynamics using multilevel vector autoregressive models that consider the network of wellness together. RESULTS:Network analyses revealed that higher physical activity on a given day predicted an increase of happiness the next day. Higher sleep quality on a given night predicted a decrease in negative emotions the next day, and higher purpose in life predicted decreased negative emotions up to 2 days later. Nodes with the highest centrality were sadness, anxiety, and happiness in the temporal network and purpose in life, anxiety, and anger in the contemporaneous network. CONCLUSIONS:Although the effects of sleep and physical activity on emotions and purpose in life may be shorter term, a sense of purpose in life is a critical component of wellness that can have slightly longer effects, bleeding into the next few days. High-arousal emotions and purpose in life are central to motivating people into action, which can lead to behavior change.